KDissert for Documenting Usability Test Results

At aKademy, Frank performed a live usability test with Thomas Nagy's kdissert, a powerful mindmapping tool for building texts.

I extended the usability test a bit and used kdissert myself to summarise the results. This is an extract of the mindmap:

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There are multiple ways to structure usability reports*: You can structure it by the software components which are affected, by general usability guidelines (consistency, user guidance, error tolerance), or you can structure them according to the use cases that were tested. Which one to select mostly depends on the target audience - developers prefer software components, usability people prefer guidelines and managers prefer use cases**.

In this case I chose to structure the report according to the use cases. Each first-level leave of the mindmap corresponds to a task. The second level leaves illustrate the steps the users performed. The sequence of the steps corresponds the priority of each step.

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The users' behaviour as well as suggestions can be described in more detail in a leave's comments field.

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But kdissert is not only a mindmapping tool. A text document, presentation or html file can be generated from the mindmap. In a text document, the comments will be shown in the corresponding subchapters. This makes the whole tool quite cool, as it supports both a visual arrangement of your ideas and the linguistic elaboration :-)

* Note that this case can not really be called a usability test as only one user was tested (it was a live test at aKademy and I've not yet had the time to test more users).

**This classification is, of course, over simplified ;-)